October 2013

10/25/2013

#Protip for former National Security Agency boss Michael Hayden: Lower your voice on the train.

Tom Matzzie,
a political strategist and former Washington director of MoveOn.org, was
catapulted to Twitter stardom Thursday night for his 140-character
reports on Hayden. Matzzie was sitting three seats away on an Acela express train when he started overhearing phrases such as "black sites" and CIA. He wrote that Hayden was talking to journalists "on background" and asking them to quote him not by name, but as a "former senior administration official."

Matzzie later wrote that someone called Hayden on the phone (wonder how that conversation went, "Uh, Mike, your old pals at NSA here. Yeah, could you, like, stop talking to reporters on the train.") Hayden then approached Matzzie, posed for a photo and engaged him a conversation about the 4th Amendment about unreasonable search and seizure.

Doesn't sound like Matzzie got much sleep Thursday night, fielding interview requests. Love the ending of this New York Magazine Q&A:

Are you paranoid right now? Did you go home and clear your search history?No. Email login didn't work for a minute. But that was just ALL CAPS.

Are you a hero or a traitor?Is that really a question?

(No.)

The New York Times picked up the story too. "I cannot recall a single disparaging comment I made about the
administration," Hayden told the Times, disputing Mr. Matzzie’s post. "I wasn’t saying anything
sensitive or classified. These were just routine conversations. I can’t
believe you guys are making such a big deal out of this."

10/24/2013

An artist's reconstruction of the Parasaurolophus discovered by a California high school student. The specimen, nicknamed Joe, is the smallest, youngest, most complete fossil of its species ever discovered. TYLER KEILLOR PHOTO

Finding a dinosaur fossil is the stuff of fantasy for many children, which is why we never seem to tire of kids who stumble across the holy grail of all nerds.

In elementary school, some classmates and I were convinced we had found one. For two recesses in a row, we tugged away at a thick, mysterious sheet buried beneath the gravel of the playground. We were convinced it was dinosaur skin. It turned out to be felt.

That's sort of what happened to Kevin Terris, a high school kid from California — except he actually found a dinosaur.

And not just any dinosaur. He found what turned out to be a complete skeleton of the youngest, smallest Parasaurolophus ever discovered, one of the most distinctive members of the hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur family.

Terris discovered the specimen in southern Utah after professional paleontologists had walked within a couple feet of the bones, which were sticking up from the ground, and not noticed them. When the team started investigating, they immediately came across a whole skull.

"I was ecstatic," Terris said in a statement on dinosaurjoe.org, a website that acts as a "virtual museum" devoted to the dino, including 3D digital scans of the fossil.

The Parasaurolophus was nicknamed "Joe" after Joe Augustyn, a long-time donor to the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif., where the dinosaur is now displayed.

Andrew Farke is the lead author on the study announcing the find and a paleontologist at the museum, which happens to share its grounds with a high school. In a blog post, Farke explains that his team often brings along interested students to help in the field.

In the summer of 2009, Farke, Terris, and two other students were prospecting for fossils at the Grande Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. As the Joe website tells it, they were hiking to unexplored territory through a section that had already been searched two years in a row.

Terris, who had just finished his senior year, pointed to a bone sticking out from under a hoo-doo (a mushroom-shaped rock). Farke dismissed it — it was a boring rib, he thought. Besides, this area had already been well covered.

But Farke went to the other side of the rock anyway and turned over a smaller rock to find an intact skull — a thrilling find.

And when the crew dusted off the debris around the "rib," the discovered it was actually a set of toe bones. Based on the size of the bones and their location, they figured there must be an entire baby dinosaur buried under the hoo-doo.

After a summer of excavation a year later, a helicopter ride and two years of preparation, Joe the dino emerged into view.

Analysis of rings in Joe's bones — kind of like tree rings — showed the animal was less than a year old when it died. It had already grown to 2.5 metres in length — a huge growth rate, since it would have been about the size of a human infant at birth.

Even more interestingly, while adult Parasaurolophi have a distinctive tube-shaped bone crest on their heads, Joe had a tiny bump. That shows this species grows its headgear at a really young age in comparison to its duck-billed cousins, but also that the headgear changes massively throughout the animal's stages of life.

Joe is now on exhibit at the Alf museum. (My sheet of felt, if anyone is curious, is probably still where we left it at the playground.)

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen.

Finally, a justified correction on language use at Guantanamo. For the record, Navy Capt. Robert Durand, Guantanamo's longtime spokesperson for the Joint Task Force GTMO, is indeed muscular, not "thickset." There's a saying among troops at Guantanamo that you either leave "hunk, chunk or drunk," (there's not much to do in your spare time on the island other than work out, eat, or drink).

Well, who did I see at 4:45 a.m. working out to the latest fitness craze known as "Insanity" one August morning in Guantanamo's media hangar? That's right, that's Durand jumping about.

Public Affairs Officers during a pre-dawn work out in Guantanamo's media hangar in August 2013. MICHELLE SHEPHARD / TORONTO STAR

Here's a recent photo courtesy the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg of Durand (left) and his replacement, Navy Commander John Filostrat, who recently took over the post.

If you'd like more evidence for the "thickset" vs. "muscular" debate, the Daily Mail dug further, posting Facebook photos of Durand in a wetsuit beside his equally slender wife, at a race finish line, and at his 1990 wedding (he appears muscular then, too).

The Washington Post article that required the correction featured Durand's unenviable task of improving Guantanamo's image.

Managing the message at Guantanamo has been an issue since the Pentagon released the first images of the detainees in Camp X-Ray's outdoor pens, which were replaced by permanent facilities four months later. Journalists touring Guantanamo are shown the spot where that 2002 photo was taken — a none-too-subtle suggestion for the before and after shot.

What is refreshing — and yet so amusing — about the Washington Post correction is that it concerns Durand's physical description, not Guantanamo's.

In past years public affairs officials may have bristled about the Post's headline that refers to Gitmo's "prison camp." One former commander in particular liked to correct journalists who didn't refer to Guantanamo as a "detention centre" and prisoners as "detainees." (The significance is that prisoners of war are afforded Geneva Convention rights that Guantanamo detainees were not.)

In their piece, the two doctors struggle to define the emotions they felt after learning about Davis' story. Not shocked, not saddened, not disheartened.

"We were simply appalled," they write.

Tommy Davis (not his real name) has a full-time job. His wife does too. Nonetheless, both had been "chronically uninsured" for some time when Davis walked into a Louisville clinic for indigent persons in March.

Davis came in complaining of stomach pain and "obstipation" — chronic constipation caused by an obstruction in the intestine. He drained his life savings — $10,000 — to pay for a litany of medical exams. Then he walked out of the clinic with a diagnosis of metastatic colon cancer and a decision to forgo treatment.

But this was not Davis' first time seeing a doctor, as Stillman and Tailor explain.

One year earlier, he had seen another doctor, complaining of similar symptoms. He was told he would need insurance to be adequately evaluated — and he was charged $200 for this medical advice.

According to Stillman and Tailor, Davis was poor and ineligible for Kentucky Medicaid. So he went the DIY route when it came to medical treatment, using "enemas until he was unable to defecate."

"Mr. Davis had had an inkling that something was awry, but he'd been
unable to pay for an evaluation," Stillman and Tailor write.

"As his wife sobbed next to him in our
examination room, he recounted his months of weight loss, the unbearable
pain of his bowel movements and his gnawing suspicion that he had
cancer. 'If we'd found it sooner,' he contended, 'it would have made a
difference. But now I'm just a dead man walking.'"

Stillman and Tailor say such "unconscionable" stories have become all too common in the United States and they describe several other uninsured patients from their clinic. Earlier this year, this blog featured another article by a frustrated physician, describing a patient who went to jail to get life-saving surgery.

The Louisville doctors believe "elected officials bear a great deal of blame for the appalling
vulnerability of the 22 per cent of American adults who currently lack
insurance." The Affordable Care Act, they maintain, is the "only legitimate legislative attempt to provide near-universal health coverage."

Stillman and Tailor believe Davis' life could have turned out differently if he'd been insured — after all, there areanumberofstudies that suggest the uninsured have poorer health outcomes.

"We find it terribly and tragically inhumane that Mr. Davis and tens of thousands of other citizens of this wealthy country will die this year for lack of insurance."

The charge against Pennsylvania Rob Ford stems from a late-night arrest at a police checkpoint on Cowpath Lane in August. Officers detected alcohol on Ford's breath and observed his eyes were "red and watery," according to the police complaint.

Pennsylvania Rob Ford blew over — a toxicology report later revealed a blood-alcohol count of 0.111 per cent — and it appears his problems might blow over, as well.

Outside court, his lawyer noted he "has never been in trouble in his life" and therefore will be applying for the county's Accelerated Rehabilitation Disposition for first-time offenders.

So if Pennsylvania Rob Ford successfully completes mandatory alcohol and highway safety classes, pays a fine and court costs, he is likely to have the whole thing expunged from his record, according to the Montgomery News.

"Ford did have a few beers at the Phillies game ... and it got him over the legal limit," Pennsylvania Rob Ford's attorney, Gregory Gifford, told the paper.

"We have checkpoints because police are trying to curb anyone who drinks and drives, even if you're at a low level like my client was — it's just for safety reasons. So it is what it is."

Mitch Potter is the Toronto Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third foreign posting after previous assignments to London and Jerusalem.

10/23/2013

If you watched former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney on 60 Minutes Sunday explaining how his doctors disabled the wireless function on his heart defibrillator, worried that terrorists could deliver a fatal jolt, and thought, "Huh, is this a rerun?" well, then you are obviously a Homeland fan.

Homeland, the hit television series on the CIA, featuring the wonderfully complicated main character Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes), featured a story line last season where the vice president was indeed killed in such a plot.

That feeling of déjà vu came again earlier this month when news broke about the U.S. Navy SEAL raid on a Somali villa, while many kilometres northwest, commandos with Delta Force snatched a terrorism suspect off the streets of Libya. (Homeland spoiler alert.) The premiere of the show's third season began with a series of covert raids, although there were six of them and they were all successful (the Somali raid, in real life, was aborted).

Police complain that television has produced the “CSI effect” — a jury member's expectation that there will be forensic evidence in all cases. Then there was Jack Bauer, the protagonist of Fox TV's terrorism drama 24. Bauer always stopped that "ticking time bomb" and almost always did it through torture. The program was so popular — and influential — that, as theNew Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point met with 24’s creative team in 2006 to ask that they write an episode where torture doesn’t work.

Apparently the show "adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.”

Zero Dark Thirty has become the historic record for many on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The movie strongly suggests that tortured interrogations delivered the key intelligence, when the evidence says otherwise. When asked if bin Laden's death vindicated the much-maligned "enhanced interrogation techniques," Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, answered, "No, absolutely not" (a 6,300-page committee intelligence report on the subject, which reportedly cost American taxpayers $40 million to produce, remains secret).

But I anticipate a likely Hollywood plot will focus on a conflicted drone pilot who kills by day and goes to his kid's soccer game at night. That is sure to get good ratings.

On Tuesday, victims of a drone attack in Pakistan are expected to testify before a U.S. congressional hearing. Rafiq ur-Rehman, his 13-year-old son, Zubair, and his 9-year-old daughter, Nabila, are travelling to Washington from the tribal region of North Waziristan, site of an alleged U.S. strike last year. The two children were injured and their grandmother, Mamana, was killed.

A nurse injects a child with a TB vaccine as part of the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative trials in January 2011. TB is one of the deadliest diseases in the medical lexicon. Untreated, it kills roughly half the people it infects. AFP PHOTO/RODGER BOSCH

MISSING: Nearly 3 million people with tuberculosis who are not getting diagnosed or receiving treatment.

These are the two most urgent messages contained in the World Health Organization's latest tuberculosis report, released today. Tuberculosis is a highly contagious bacterial disease that is both curable and preventable — yet next to HIV/AIDS, it is the world's biggest killer due to a single infectious agent.

The WHO report provides a snapshot of the global TB problem and the emerging picture does contain some bright spots: TB treatment has saved 22 million lives since 1995; the number of cases dropped from 8.7 million in 2011 to 8.6 million last year; deaths have come down from 1.4 million to 1.3 million; and the world is on track to meet the UN Millennium Development goal of cutting TB deaths in half by 2015.

But two major challenges threaten to reverse the gains: an estimated 2.9 million people are still being "missed" by health systems (amounting to about one in three people getting sick with TB), and there is a growing threat from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which infected an estimated 450,000 people last year.

Both challenges have the same root problem, the WHO says: a lack of resources.

"Quality TB care for millions worldwide has driven down TB deaths," said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's TB program, in a news release. "But far too many people are still missing out on such care and are suffering as a result."

The WHO estimates that 75 per cent of the "missing" TB cases are in just 12 countries: India (where 31 per cent of the world's TB cases are located), South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Myanmar.

Even more alarmingly, the most dangerous TB infections — those that are drug resistant — are also being missed and fewer than 25 per cent of these superbug cases were diagnosed in 2012. As for the drug-resistant cases that do get picked up, many of them aren't being treated; last year, an estimated 16,000 TB superbug infections went untreated, according to the WHO.

"The unmet demand for a full-scale and quality response to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a real public health crisis," Raviglione said. "It is unacceptable that increased access to diagnosis is not being matched by increased access to (multidrug-resistant TB) care.

The WHO report listed five priorities in the fight against TB, including catching the missing 2.9 million cases and treating multidrug-resistant TB as a public health crisis.

The report also called for more funding to ensure a full response to the TB crisis. Funding for TB in 2013 is currently pegged at about $6 billion (U.S.) but at least $7 billion to $8 billion is needed, the report says.

10/22/2013

Family members of Sept. 11 victims often compliment her sketches as they peer over her shoulder in the courthouse's visitor gallery. Lawyers stopping by the media hangar for news conferences admire her work and ask for copies.

Even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind who is now on trial, knows Janet — if not by name, then by her drawings. He once famously criticized her work, demanding via a court security officer that she make his nose smaller.

What makes New York-based Janet Hamlin's Guantanamo work so special is that she has covered the war court hearings since 2006, thereby capturing a piece of history. That is especially important in a place like Guantanamo, where access is limited.

Her job has never been easy. In addition to the time and personal expense that such trips to the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay require, Janet faces restrictions on her work. When she started in 2006, she was not allowed to draw the faces of the men on trial — a rule since lifted. For years Janet fought for the right to use stadium eyeglasses to better see the accused, as she does in U.S. courts. Three years ago she was granted permission. In June it was revoked without explanation, other than citing a new rule that "ocular amplification" devises were forbidden in the courtroom.

Now Janet has put Guantanamo's war courts — the history-in-the-making — in an extensive book, "Sketching Guantanamo." A large section of the book is devoted to the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, from his first days before the military commission as a teenager, to his guilty plea in October 2010.

Each of Janet's sketches must be approved by a court security officer before she is allowed to run back to the media hangar (art pad and box of charcoals in hand), where she coats the sketches with hairspray to prevent smudging and transmits those exclusive images to the world.

Boston was a critical favourite for what one reader called "an ugly brutalist structure" that resembles Toronto's equally prison-like former Sears headquarters on Jarvis St.

Buffalo's city hall also made the architectural "don't" list, labelled by one contributor as "the largest, most hideous statement of excess ... Built when Buffalo was important (pre St. Lawrence seaway), it now looks ridiculous in size and scale compared to the rest of the city."

Buffalo's "hideous statement of excess"

Closer to home, Mississauga city hall was lambasted by one reader for looking like "a 19th-century prison." Said another of this local attempt at municipal majesty: "I want to take a wrecking ball to Mississauga's city hall."

Mississauga city hall: Time for the wrecking ball?

Misguided civic eyesores were noted in smaller cities, as well, with B.C.'s Trail logging a vote as "a real clunker." Note the evocative symbolism carved out of innovative design features here.

Our own nomination for the world's ugliest city hall — a pain-in-the-eyeball structure in Satu Mare, Romania — garnered support from readers, one of whom called it "a futuristic fortress from a sci-fi movie. Ugly and brutalist indeed."

"I live in Satu Mare," wrote one World Daily reader. "The above-mentioned monstrosity was constructed in the '70s. I had a German architect friend over, and he described the style as Stalin-barock. It is truly one of the many shameful buildings staining the city."

10/18/2013

Website SleepingInAirports has named Singapore Changi the world's best airport – again. As for Toronto Pearson, it is Number Two in North America, behind Vancouver.

The votes have been counted, and the prize for best airport
in the world for 2013 goes to …

Singapore
Changi.

That’s no surprise. The Singaporean airport has been rated
Number One for 17 consecutive years.

“Even after all this time, the airport continues to impress
travellers with its comfort and long list of activities,” says the website
SleepingInAirports, which conducted the competition.

The top North American airport in the contest – and the only
Canadian airport to make the Top Ten worldwide – is Vancouver at Number Nine in the world.

Although it didn’t make the global Top Ten, Toronto Pearson
was rated the second best airport in North America, after Vancouver.

As for airports deemed to be the world’s worst, the big
winner (translation: “loser”) in that category is Manila
Ninoy Aquino
Airport in the Filipino capital,
followed by Italy’s
Bergamo Orio al Serio Airport.

Half of the airports rated among the worst in the world are
located in Asia, including three facilities in India
and one in Pakistan.
Paris Beauvais, Frankfurt Hahn, Rome Fiumicino and Los Angeles are also counted among the least desirable
places to get on or off a plane.

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